Johns-Manville Corp: Asbestos History & Liability

Company History & Asbestos Involvement

The story of Johns-Manville begins in 1858, when Henry Ward Johns founded H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company in New York City. Johns was an inventor and entrepreneur who recognized asbestos as an almost miraculous industrial material — heat resistant, fireproof, chemically inert, and abundant in deposits across North America and Canada. His company quickly became a leading supplier of asbestos-based roofing and insulation products to a rapidly industrializing nation.

In 1901, H.W. Johns Mfg. merged with the Manville Covering Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, creating Johns-Manville Corporation. The combined entity had unrivaled access to raw asbestos fiber through partial ownership of mines in Quebec, Canada — most notably the Jeffrey Mine in Val-des-Sources (then called Asbestos), Quebec — and a national distribution infrastructure that could reach virtually every construction site, shipyard, and factory in America.

Through the early and mid-twentieth century, Johns-Manville expanded aggressively. The company's flagship plant in Manville, New Jersey grew into a 1,500-acre industrial campus employing more than 3,500 workers at its peak. A second major facility in Waukegan, Illinois processed asbestos fiber and manufactured finished products for the Midwest and Great Plains markets. Additional plants in Marrero and Gretna, Louisiana; Pittsburg, California; Lompoc, California; Nashua, New Hampshire; Billerica, Massachusetts; and Jarratt, Virginia extended the company's manufacturing reach coast to coast.

By mid-century, Johns-Manville was the largest asbestos company in the world. The company operated its own mines, ran its own research laboratories, lobbied Congress on asbestos regulations, and set industry standards that other manufacturers followed. Its product catalogue at peak included more than 500 separate asbestos-containing items. The brand name Transite — an asbestos-cement pipe used in water distribution and sewer systems across hundreds of American cities — became virtually synonymous with the company.

The post-World War II construction boom supercharged Johns-Manville's growth. Federal housing programs drove demand for asbestos roofing shingles and floor tiles. The shipbuilding industry — fueled by the Cold War naval buildup — consumed enormous quantities of pipe insulation and fireproofing. Schools, hospitals, and office buildings across the country were insulated, fireproofed, and tiled with Johns-Manville products. The company's revenues and profits soared through the 1950s and 1960s.

That prosperity, however, rested on a hidden catastrophe. Internal documents that emerged in asbestos litigation during the 1970s and 1980s would reveal that Johns-Manville's own executives had known for decades that asbestos exposure caused fatal lung disease — and had deliberately concealed that knowledge from their workforce and the public.

By the late 1970s, a cascade of personal injury lawsuits filed by sick workers and their families threatened to overwhelm the company's finances. Claims numbered in the tens of thousands. Legal reserves proved wholly inadequate. On August 26, 1982, Johns-Manville Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — becoming the first Fortune 500 company in American history to seek bankruptcy reorganization primarily to manage asbestos liability. The filing stunned Wall Street and permanently reshaped how courts and Congress would handle mass tort claims.

After years of complex negotiations, Johns-Manville emerged from bankruptcy in 1988 as Manville Corporation. The reorganization plan created the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, funded with cash, stock, and insurance proceeds, to pay existing and future asbestos claimants. Manville Corporation continued to operate building products businesses, and Berkshire Hathaway eventually acquired those operations. The asbestos trust, however, remains the primary vehicle through which victims seek compensation to this day.

Products & Exposure Mechanisms

Johns-Manville manufactured asbestos into an extraordinary range of end products. The table below outlines the major product categories, their typical asbestos content, how exposure occurred, and where these products were used.

Because Johns-Manville products were so widely used, exposure was not limited to the company's own workers. Electricians, pipefitters, plumbers, insulators, carpenters, drywall finishers, roofers, auto mechanics, and shipyard workers all encountered these materials regularly — often working in enclosed spaces with little or no ventilation. Secondary household exposure occurred when plant workers brought asbestos dust home on their clothing and skin, exposing spouses and children who laundered those garments or embraced family members at the end of a shift.

Key Facilities & Exposure Sites

Johns-Manville's manufacturing operations spanned the entire country. The facilities listed below represent the sites where documented occupational asbestos exposure was most severe and where asbestos-related disease rates among workers were highest.

The Waukegan, Illinois plant deserves special attention. After operations ceased, investigators found asbestos fiber contamination throughout the factory buildings and in the surrounding soil at levels far exceeding safe thresholds. The site was placed on the EPA National Priorities List (Superfund) and has required decades of remediation work. Nearby residential neighborhoods and sections of the Lake Michigan shoreline were also affected, broadening exposure beyond factory workers to include community residents.

At the Manville, New Jersey campus, community exposure was so pervasive that the town itself was named after the company — and public health studies conducted after the plant's closure documented elevated rates of mesothelioma among former residents who had never worked at the plant but had lived near it for years.

What Workers Knew — The Corporate Concealment Record

Perhaps the most damning chapter of the Johns-Manville story is not the harm the company caused, but the harm it concealed. Decades of internal correspondence, medical records, and corporate memos — unearthed through discovery in asbestos litigation — documented a systematic effort by the company's leadership to keep workers and the public ignorant of the lethal consequences of asbestos exposure.

The Sumner Simpson Letters (1935)

Among the most notorious documents to emerge from asbestos litigation were the "Sumner Simpson letters," a series of correspondence between Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's corporate counsel, and Sumner Simpson, president of Raybestos-Manhattan — another major asbestos manufacturer. In these 1935 letters, Brown and Simpson discussed how to handle a group of scientific studies being conducted by Dr. Leroy Gardner at the Saranac Lake Laboratories in upstate New York, studies that were producing alarming evidence about asbestos-induced disease.

In one of the most frequently cited passages, Brown wrote that it would be "unwise" to publish Gardner's findings in scientific literature because doing so would "cause the whole asbestos industry to be in jeopardy." Simpson agreed. The two executives effectively coordinated an industry-wide strategy to suppress and delay publication of medical findings that could have warned workers of the risks they faced every day on the job.

The Saranac Lake Studies

The Saranac Lake Laboratories had been conducting animal experiments with asbestos fiber since the late 1920s and human epidemiological surveys of asbestos workers since the early 1930s. By the mid-1930s, Dr. Gardner's research had established a clear link between asbestos dust inhalation and pulmonary fibrosis (asbestosis), and his work was beginning to point toward a possible cancer connection as well.

Johns-Manville was a financial sponsor of the Saranac Lake research. This funding relationship gave company executives early access to the scientists' findings — and the leverage to influence what was ultimately published. When Johns-Manville's own medical director, Kenneth Smith, later compiled health records from the Manville plant showing that a large percentage of longtime employees had asbestosis-related findings on chest X-ray, he was reportedly instructed not to inform the workers of their diagnoses. Smith himself later testified in deposition that he had been directed to keep those X-ray results from workers because "if you told them, they would stop working."

Borel v. Fibreboard (1973) and the Document Avalanche

The pivotal moment for public awareness came in 1973 when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp. Clarence Borel was a Texas insulation worker who had developed both asbestosis and mesothelioma after decades of working with products from Fibreboard, Johns-Manville, and other manufacturers. The Fifth Circuit held that asbestos manufacturers could be held strictly liable for failure to warn users of their products' known hazards — a landmark ruling that opened mass tort litigation against the entire asbestos industry.

Borel opened the floodgates of discovery. Plaintiff's attorneys subpoenaed the internal document archives of Johns-Manville and other manufacturers. What they found was extraordinary: decades of correspondence between executives, corporate doctors, and outside attorneys demonstrating actual corporate knowledge of asbestos hazards as far back as the 1930s, paired with deliberate decisions to suppress that knowledge and fight the compensation claims of sick workers.

Courts across the country began allowing these internal documents into evidence, and jury verdicts against Johns-Manville — often accompanied by substantial punitive damage awards reflecting the company's willful concealment — multiplied rapidly. By 1981, the company faced more than 16,500 pending lawsuits, with thousands of new claims being filed each month. Its insurers contested coverage; its legal reserves proved grotesquely insufficient. The bankruptcy filing on August 26, 1982 was the inevitable result.

The Legacy of Concealment

The Johns-Manville corporate concealment record became the foundational case study for mass tort asbestos litigation and ultimately for the asbestos trust fund system that Congress and the courts have relied on ever since. Law review articles, federal judicial opinions, and Congressional testimony repeatedly cited the company's internal documents as proof that the asbestos industry had knowingly sacrificed workers' lives for profit. The 1982 bankruptcy, paradoxically, became the model for how to manage mass tort liability through structured settlement — a model that has since been applied to dozens of other industries facing widespread product liability claims for latent injuries.

Trust Fund Status & How to File a Claim

The Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust was established on November 28, 1988, as a condition of Johns-Manville's Chapter 11 plan of reorganization. It was the first asbestos trust fund ever created in the United States and served as the template for the more than 60 asbestos trusts that exist today. Over the decades since its creation, the Manville Trust has paid out billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of claimants diagnosed with asbestos-related diseases.

What the Trust Pays

Like all asbestos trusts, the Manville Trust schedules claim values based on the claimant's diagnosed disease. Mesothelioma — the most aggressive and fatal asbestos-caused cancer — receives the highest scheduled value. Other qualifying diseases include lung cancer with confirmed asbestos exposure, asbestosis, pleural disease, and other asbestos-related conditions. The trust currently pays claims at a payment percentage of approximately 5.1% of the scheduled value for the applicable disease category.

While 5.1% may sound modest in isolation, the scheduled values for serious diseases like mesothelioma are set at high base amounts that reflect the severity of the injury. Many claimants also pursue claims against multiple trusts simultaneously — because most mesothelioma patients were exposed to asbestos from many manufacturers over many years — and may file separate tort claims against solvent defendants not protected by a trust. A skilled asbestos attorney can coordinate multi-trust filings and tort litigation to maximize total recovery.

Who Qualifies to File

To qualify for compensation from the Manville Trust, a claimant must demonstrate two things: first, that they were exposed to a Johns-Manville asbestos product; and second, that they have been diagnosed with an asbestos-related disease. Exposure documentation can come from employment records, union records, co-worker affidavits, product identification testimony, or Social Security earnings records. Medical documentation must include a physician's diagnosis supported by pathology reports, imaging studies, or pulmonary function test results meeting the trust's medical criteria.

Eligible claimants include current and former workers at Johns-Manville manufacturing facilities, workers in trades who regularly used JM products (pipefitters, insulators, roofers, auto mechanics, shipyard workers, drywall finishers), and in some cases family members who experienced secondary exposure through a worker's contaminated clothing or through living near a JM facility.

The Filing Process

Claims against the Manville Trust are administered through a structured claims process. Claimants — typically represented by an experienced asbestos attorney — submit a claim package that includes medical records, exposure documentation, and a completed claim form. The trust reviews the submission and either approves payment at the current payment percentage or returns the claim with requests for additional documentation.

The trust offers two review tracks: a standard review and an expedited review available to claimants with terminal diagnoses like mesothelioma or severe lung cancer. Expedited review is strongly recommended for mesothelioma patients given the rapid progression of the disease; claims can be resolved in weeks rather than months under the expedited track. Attorneys experienced in asbestos claims know how to structure the submission package to minimize back-and-forth with the trust administrator and secure timely payment.

Statutes of Limitations

One of the most important — and most frequently misunderstood — aspects of asbestos trust claims is timing. Each state has its own statute of limitations that governs how long a claimant has to file after diagnosis. In most states, this window is two to three years from the date of diagnosis (or the date the claimant knew or should have known that their illness was connected to asbestos exposure). These deadlines are real and strictly enforced. A person who waits too long may lose the right to recover entirely, regardless of the strength of their underlying claim.

If you or a family member has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, asbestosis, or another asbestos-related disease and you believe the exposure may have involved Johns-Manville products, you should consult an experienced asbestos attorney as soon as possible. Most asbestos attorneys work on a contingency fee basis — you owe no fee unless they recover money for you — and an initial consultation is free.

Frequently Asked Questions